Why ‘Hoping for the Best’ is a Failing Strategy for your Dental Practice

Announcer:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Millionaire Dentist Podcast, brought to you by Four Quadrants Advisory. On this podcast, we break down the world of dentistry finances and business practices to help you become the millionaire dentist you deserve to be. Please be advised we do speak with an honest tongue and may not be safe for work.

Casey Hiers:
Hello and welcome. This is Casey Hiers back at the Millionaire Dentist Podcast in studio with a refreshed Jarrod Bridgeman.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Casey, how are you? I'm so glad to see you. I'm feeling so much better than I did last week, and here I am, a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

Casey Hiers:
Love it.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Last podcast, we mentioned some of your flight issues coming back from Bozeman, Montana. But I kind of wanted to talk to you a little bit more about your trip and how that went, and how it feels being in the big open-sky area.

Casey Hiers:
Well, it's interesting. I won't bore our listeners too much with my travel problems, but there's a little bit there that we can talk about. And then in addition, it's interesting. Sometimes we have lots of content to share, and other times we don't, and so we'll also pivot to, "What do you do if you don't have a plan?" And we'll get into all of that. But yeah, travel right now, we've talked about it. We're traveling a lot, but government funds and Department of Homeland Security not funding TSA, and so there's issues at the airport. And then there's been a lot of wind, and there's been a lot of weather, and there's been a lot of canceled flights. And so, yeah, we went out to Bozeman, Montana, had a lovely flight from Indianapolis to Salt Lake City. And I don't love to fly, I've mentioned that, but really, once my kids were born, I don't know what happened mentally.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Something shifted in you.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah, yeah. So I've got my techniques, listen to some music, and some other things to calm me.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Your smooth jazz. You're adult contemporary.

Casey Hiers:
But yeah, we landed in Salt Lake, and I think I had to run a quarter of a mile through the airport just to make the connection, blah, blah, blah. I realized how out of shape I was as I was hacking. My lungs were burning. I was telling everybody around me on that next flight, "I'm not sick. I just had to run, and my lungs are on fire."

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Well, let's start a little running club, the Four Quadrants Running Club. We'll start a quarter mile at a time. Just like in Fast & Furious, "I live my life a quarter mile all the time."

Casey Hiers:
Oh, that's a great quote.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
But speaking of which, you already brought this up a little bit, but the whole point of this episode and what spurred it was is I literally had no ideas of what we should talk about. I didn't have a plan. I didn't have anything. I was like, "Casey, please, can you make a plan for me?"

Casey Hiers:
Yeah. I'm going to walk us through this. So then an hour flight from Salt Lake to Bozeman, 80 mile per hour wind gusts when you're a couple of hundred feet from the runway and your plane's getting blown sideways, thankfully I was on a good airline with good pilots with instincts because we pulled straight up, because I have a feeling if we would've landed, it would've been not great. We barely had enough fuel to get back to Salt Lake. That plane was not going to land in Bozeman that day. And so I got the last rental car, literally talked to every company. "We don't do one-ways to Bozeman. We're sold out. Blah, blah, blah." Last rental car drove six-and-a-half hours. Beautiful drive driving from Utah to through Idaho to Montana.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
It's beautiful out there.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah, really nice. Speed limit's 80, so you can set the cruise to 90.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Nice. Yeah.

Casey Hiers:
And we got there 10 minutes to spare, and then the TV wasn't there to broadcast the presentation. I'm normally pretty nice to the venues we go to. Very direct communication to make sure the TV got placed.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Sure.

Casey Hiers:
That's the backstory. So did our presentation, really nice room, nice people. And again, out there, people drive distances to come see us. There was a young guy he had it all figured out, and it was great. But there were some others, really sharp people. Like, that first impression, sharp people. But one of them kind of stayed a little later and waited until his peers left, and he goes, "Casey, everything you talked about, that's me. Everything. Tax strategy doesn't exist. Debt, tons of it. Retirement, that's funny. Cash flow. Income. Insurance. Investment." I mean, it was everything. And he was like, "How did you know?" And I was like, "Well, we've been doing this for 22 years, and we've looked at thousands of data points from practice owners around the country," kind of got into that.

But it was interesting what he said. He said, "I really haven't had a plan. I have great relationships with my patients. I produce great dentistry. I thought it was all going to work out." And he goes, "Now I'm in the middle of my career, and it's not working out," and he goes, "but I don't want to talk about it." He goes, "Because if I talk about it, then it's real and then I'm vulnerable and then I feel bad about myself." So that's kind of the starting spot of, we didn't really have a plan today, so we were like, let's talk about when practice owners don't really have a plan.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
It's like when that girl tried to break up with me, so I just ignored her for two weeks. So I still had a girlfriend.

Casey Hiers:
Oh my.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
It's hard for business owners. It's hard for men. It's all hard for everybody to be vulnerable, open up, and then let other people see almost your insides.

Casey Hiers:
Well, with your girlfriend situation.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
By the way, this was a long time ago.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah. You felt that it wasn't going well, and so you're like, "Well, if I don't talk to her, I don't have to really deal with the pain that's coming." And a lot of practice owners do that. They put their head in the sand, and then eventually, some never realize it.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Or when they do, it's almost they're playing too much "defense". My son and I have been playing a lot of chess together, and he often will react and move his pieces too much based upon what I'm doing instead of having his own attack plan. So I feel like sometimes that can be an issue too, is like you're stuck in this cycle of just having to play defense, having to pay off loans that you've been taking out, or finding out there's a shareholder loan as we talked about last week. And so it's just this constant, you may not have time to create a plan, or the plans you have had have been outrageously wild sometimes.

Casey Hiers:
Well, let's stick with this analogy. Chess. Your son's in second grade, playing chess.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yes.

Casey Hiers:
Is that like a humble brag? He sounds really smart.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
He's smarter than I am already.

Casey Hiers:
One thing we see practice owners do is they're not really addressing the real problem. And so with chess, you mentioned the defense, I think that's good. Staff and team are always a challenge, but sometimes practice owners are comfortable living in that complaint of staffing team because it's not really getting at the heart of it. Cash flow, income, overhead, payroll. "Am I going to be able to retire?" That's really what it is.

So with your son and this analogy, "Well, my chess pieces, I don't like the color. And you have better ones than I have, and I don't like the color of mine." And so, well, no, it's your strategy. It's your technique. It's the training. It's who has helped you get better at chess. That's what actually matters. Staff and team is tough, don't get me wrong, but I reject that that's the reason why people aren't financially where they want to be. It's a reason, but there's 28 other reasons that are actually way more important to deal with than just sticking with that one excuse, because then they're like, "Well, it can't be done," head in the sand.

But then they have that "aha" moment, but then they might be vulnerable. Others are going to see that my practice it's a house of cards. There's a lot of posers in dentistry, a lot of people that'll tell you about their real estate, and they'll tell you about all this stuff and it's a house of cards because it's poor decision-making. They don't have strategy, they don't have guidance. And emotionally, it doesn't feel good. And what dentists and specialists need to realize is addressing this is not an indictment on you. You weren't trained in this thing. You're a dentist. Embrace it, lean into it, but don't settle. The ones that have enough confidence to at least figure out, "What are my biggest challenges? Are these normal? Can they be solved?" That's where you need to get. Too many people just want to try to figure it out because it doesn't feel good to be vulnerable, but that's the first step to getting better.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Right. And there's no option of like, "Oh, you're going to get 'in trouble' because of these issues in terms of in your business." This isn't the same as doing something clinically wrong, and a malpractice kind of thing comes up. Your patients, A, won't know, but B, aren't going to fault you that, "You know what, my dentist may not be the greatest."

Casey Hiers:
No, but the worldview is most practice owners are problem solvers.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yeah.

Casey Hiers:
Their staff and team look to them; their patients look to them.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Right. They're the captain of the ship there.

Casey Hiers:
Everybody looks to them. And so the idea that, "I can't figure this out or I'm not..."

Jarrod Bridgeman:
"Smart enough or I'll look weak in front of my family and my employees."

Casey Hiers:
Here's another analogy. In my younger years, I used to love looking at pictures that were taken. And then as I've gotten older and Father Time and metabolism have kind of kicked in, well, I don't like the way I look in pictures all the time. And I could be like, "Well, that camera's old and the lighting's bad and the angle stinks." No, my fat ass doesn't work out like I should. Move more, eat less. That's the core problem. It's not the camera and the lighting and the angle and blah, blah, blah.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
What if you get like a really big facelift? I've seen some really cool-looking celebrities.

Casey Hiers:
I'm natural. I'm natural. I'm not doing that. But I think this analogy sticks because too many practice owners want to blame other things versus what's the root problem. You have to diagnose something before you can prescribe the solution. And too many practice owners aren't even open to the diagnosis because they feel bad. Somebody gets diagnosed with cancer. Well, okay, probably better to know that soon to fix it versus like, "Well, I don't like cancer. I don't want to have cancer. I'm just going to ignore it. It'll be better. I'm going to eat some vegetables tonight."

Jarrod Bridgeman:
"My tooth hurts, it'll fix itself."

Casey Hiers:
Like, what are we doing here? And maybe these are some extreme analogies, but a lot of practice owners, when it comes to these important business, financial, and decision-making things in their life and in their practice, that's the mentality they have. Brilliant people, brilliant clinicians, good spouses, good parents, good friends, they excel in life, but they just don't want to address the core issue. Issues.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
They won't address it, and they've tried a few things here and there. Maybe they have tried to address, on some level, and it's gotten almost to the breaking point with them. How often have you heard and/or seen business owners, practice owners out there try some big Hail Marys to try and alleviate a situation?

Casey Hiers:
Well, sometimes I'll hear people say, "Dentistry's not what I thought it was, and I'm burnt out, and I'm thinking about being a speaker, being an author, being a consultant, working in a university." None of those things are wrong, but it's avoiding, sometimes, the root problem. "I'm just going to sell my practice and be an associate." Have the courage to get a practice that overhead is sub 60. All these things can be mastered. We talk about that all the time. But sometimes they don't have the ambition to correct it because they're already so beat down and burnt up and feel defeated, and so they've lost that ambition. They've lost that pursuit of excellence. And we're getting a little psychological here, but I've had enough one-on-one conversations of people getting real raw and straight, and ultimately, this is the core of a lot of things.

And again, there's dentists out there making $400,000 or $500,000. "Well, they should be making $750,000. Why aren't you?" And so sometimes it's not the dire straits. It's that middle road that's challenging of, "Well, I'm doing better than most, so nobody can tell me anything." Then they get stagnant, and they're still leaving a couple hundred thousand dollars on the table every single year. It's devastating. It's easy for us to talk about it. It's not easy to fix. That's what we do. But all this takes a lot of time. It takes honesty. Like I said, for me, I need to go exercise more. I need to not eat all the delicious double cheeseburgers.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Oh, that sounds so good, though.

Casey Hiers:
And have seven pieces of pizza instead of three. Well, that's on me.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
How many did you have yesterday?

Casey Hiers:
One, two, three, four, five, six. I don't eat breakfast.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Oh, yeah, yeah. No, we did have some nice pizza yesterday. Casey, any other follow-up things you kind of want to talk about? Again, I feel like, as you've said, the ambition needs to be there, but not only ambition, but being able to admit when you don't know what you don't know.

Casey Hiers:
View solving this as a positive. Too many people have that negative mindset of like, "I'm going to be exposed. I'm going to be vulnerable." Sometimes people even say like, "Well, I don't even want my spouse to know because they think I've got this under control and I don't." And so sometimes they think the easier path is to just keep your head in the sand. Again, this is a positive opportunity. Most people know in the pit of their stomach, "I could be doing a lot better. Why am I not?" And man, those people that can just get out of their own way.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
A real simple number to throw out there is if you have a million-dollar practice and you drop your overhead by 1%, that's $10,000 more a year.

Casey Hiers:
Mr. Mathematician over here, man, look at you. Look at you.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yeah.

Casey Hiers:
No, that's a good way to look at it. Chipping away at three, four, five points of overhead every 12 to 15 months, that matters. That adds up. Yes. It's not one or two things. It's not a home run.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
And that's more cash to invest it and that's more cash to do something else with.

Casey Hiers:
Reduce debt, improve cash flow. Yeah, it's the same things. But so much of this, yes, there are headwinds and dentistry that are out there, but a lot of it's psychological. How much are you going to tolerate? How much are you going to put up with if you have that feeling in the pit of your stomach? Yes, it's easier to just ignore it. But if it's addressed, what we see is $150,000 a year, more money over the long term of a career, millions more dollars. That's why I get on a lot of soapboxes because this topic is powerful. And we have so much joy with people who we help master this, and they achieve these things and are just like, "Oh my gosh." We've had people they're already making a million. Well, now they're making one eight, right? Now they're going to retire 6 years earlier. So all this stuff is deadly serious.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
With more money.

Casey Hiers:
Just have the courage, right? Have the courage to find out. And like we say a lot of times, another set of eyes on it to do a full diagnostic, well, my gosh, if we confirm that you're doing all the right things, that's fantastic.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yeah.

Casey Hiers:
And that happens sometimes. And other times it's, "Do you know how much money you're leaving?" And we just go through everything, and they're just like, "I knew it wasn't great, but I was making enough money that I was okay. But I'm sick to my stomach to know how much I have just left on the table." And then they get into the "Well, if I would've taken this seriously 5 years ago or 8 years ago, what would that have meant?" And we can tell them that, and that makes them sicker to their stomach, but it's all about looking forward. It's not about blame. It's not about why you're where you're at. I mean, maybe somebody's only making $200,000 in dentistry, but again, somebody might be making $400,000, but if you should be making $600,000 or $700,000, you're being a bad steward of your practice and your skillset.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
I liked your saying, "Stop looking back, make your changes now."

Casey Hiers:
Yeah.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Start now.

Casey Hiers:
Look forward. Have the courage because it's just costing you.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
It's not too late. Casey, thank you so much for stopping in today and talking to me about, again, this practice owner stuff and the psychologicalness of it and all the things that go behind it. Some of our listeners are probably associates and may not even see behind that veiled curtain of what also happens behind the scenes there. Folks, if you want to come and hear us speak some more and learn more about how you can improve your practice and fix all kinds of things, go to our website and click on our events page. We were going to be in so many different cities, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, that's a place. Yeah, we're going to be there as well. So Casey, thank you so much for stopping by, and I can't wait to see what we're going to talk about next.

Casey Hiers:
I think I've just talked myself into going for a run today.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
You should. And then a burger after.

Announcer:
That's all the time we have today. Thank you to our guests for their insight and for sharing some really great information. And thank you to you, the listener, for tuning in. The Millionaire Dentist Podcast is brought to you by Four Quadrants Advisory. To see if they might be a good fit for you and your practice, go on over to fourquadrantsadvisory.com and see why, year after year, they retain over 95% of their clients. Thank you again for joining us, and we'll see you next time.